Patriot games - Tom Clancy [221]
He lowered the extinguisher with a shamefaced grin and gestured comically to the spectators. The light was off. The switch was off. The fire, if it had been a fire, was gone. He'd call the building's electrician. Cooley opened the door to explain what was wrong to his fellow shop owners. One remarked that the wiring in the arcade was horribly out of date. It was something Cooley hadn't ever thought about. Electricity was electricity. You flipped the switch and the light went on, and that was that. It annoyed him that something so reliable, wasn't. A minute later he called the building manager, who promised that an electrician would be there in half an hour.
The man arrived forty minutes later, apologizing for being held up in traffic. He stood for a moment, admiring the bookshelves.
"Smells like a wire burned out," he judged next. "You're lucky, sir. That frequently causes a fire."
"How difficult will it be to fix?"
"I expect that I'll have to replace the wiring. Ought to have been done years ago. This old place-well, the electric service is older than I am, and that's too old by half." He smiled.
Cooley showed him to the fuse box in the back room, and the man went to work. Dennis was unwilling to use his table lamp, and sat in the semidarkness while the tradesman went to work.
The electrician flipped off the outside master switch and examined the fuse box. It still had the original inspection tag, and when he rubbed off the dust, he read off the date: 1919. The man shook his head in amazement. Almost seventy bloody years! He had to remove some items to get at the wall, and was surprised to see that there was some recent plasterwork. It was as good a place to start as any. He didn't want to damage the wall any more than he had to. With hammer and chisel he broke into the new plaster, and there was the wire
But it wasn't the right one, he thought. It had plastic insulation, not the gutta-percha used in his grandfather's time. It wasn't in quite the right place, either. Strange, he thought. He pulled on the wire. It came out easily.
"Mr. Cooley, sir?" he called. The shop owner appeared a moment later. "Do you know what this is?"
"Bloody hell!" the detective said in the room upstairs. "Bloody fucking hell!" He turned to his companion, a look of utter shock on his face. "Call Commander Owens!"
"I've never seen anything like this." He cut off the end and handed it over. The electrician did not understand why Cooley was so pale.
Neither had Cooley, but he knew what it was. The end of the wire showed nothing, just a place where the polyvinyl insulation stopped, without the copper core that one expects to see in electrical circuitry. Hidden in the end was a highly sensitive microphone. The shop owner composed himself after a moment, though his voice was somewhat raspy.
"I have no idea. Carry on."
"Yes, sir." The electrician resumed his search for the power line.
Cooley had already lifted his telephone and dialed a number.
"Hello?"
"Beatrix?"
"Good morning, Mr. Dennis. How are you today?"
"Can you come into the shop this morning? I have a small emergency."
"Certainly." She lived only a block from the Holloway Road tube station. The Piccadilly Line ran almost directly to the shop. "I can be there in fifteen minutes."
"Thank you, Beatrix. You're a love," he added before he hung up. By this time Cooley's mind was racing at mach-1. There was nothing in the shop or his home that could incriminate him. He lifted the phone again and hesitated. His instructions under these circumstances were to call a number he had memorized-but if there were a microphone in his office,